So I made the mistake of doing a vanity Google the other day and once again learned the peril authors face making overt political claims. The most obvious problem is – surprise-surprise – the human brain. You say something like ‘trickle down economics does not work,’ and the brain, which is designed to sort, clumps you into some crude category like ‘commie.’

I believe that in many (but not all) economic contexts, markets are far and away the most efficient means of distributing goods and fostering innovation. Food is an example where markets are extremely efficient: you don’t want governments managing your groceries – unless you find yourself in the middle of a famine. I append that ‘unless’ to explain why markets, although great for food in times of relative equilibrium, are horrible when it comes to things like healthcare. The social utility of supply and demand breaks down anytime the individual utility of a commodity becomes existential, which is to say, demand becomes a matter of life and death.  In these situations, the very dynamics that render distribution efficient in times of plenty overturn the applecart.

Given the combination of social super-complexity and human stupidity, centralizing social decision-making is often (but not always) the worst thing to do. I like to show Marxist-leaning friends of mine my wife’s index of jobs and professions, a book that will shortly become the size of a phone-book, I’m sure. ‘This,’ I tell them, ‘is why centrally planned economies had to fail.’ Why? Because in market economies all these social positions come about spontaneously. Could you imagine any bureaucracy capable of developing and administrating the mind-boggling complexity of contemporary economies?

Market economies are social selection mechanisms, the same way brains are neural selection mechanisms and nature is a natural selection mechanism. The economic problems societies pose are generally too complicated for any brain to tackle, so we have a system that – ideally – both fosters and tests a variety of solutions. An experimental system. I am pro-market through and through, where markets actually seem to work. Where they don’t seem to work, I am anti-market through and through. How else should I look at them?

Markets are simply social tools. Who gets turned around when someone suggests that your hammer is the wrong tool? Who actually thinks their hammer is right tool for every task?  

Idiots. What else could they be? Granted, the complexities often fool people into thinking they should hammer in screws and screw in hammers – that goes without saying. It’s the dogmatism that’s the problem. Anyone who insists up and down that a screwdriver is the best way to hammer nails is either insane, a retard, or a screwdriver salesman.

So why is it that people who are perfectly willing to be experimental in their garage suddenly become ideologues in the voting booth? Well, because something funny happens when problems become social as opposed to individual: our brains actually switch to a completely different problem-solving mode, one that is the product of endless generations of violent social competition (and perhaps presently steering the US toward disaster). Suddenly the simple question of what tool to use (and how) becomes fraught with questions of social identity.  Saying ‘trickle-down economics’ is an ineffective tool – a claim as close to factual as you can make in the ‘dismal science’ - identifies you as a member of some competing group. It literally turns you into a kind of ‘enemy.’ Since violence and scarcity characterized so much of our evolutionary past, these identifications often tend to be ‘low-resolution,’ simplistic and facile, because the consequences of multiple false positives are generally more benign than the consequences of one false negative. It’s literally better to write off whole communities than it is to be wrong about one potential threat. Parochialism paid real dividends in our evolutionary past, and now (when it could be the end of us) we simply cannot stop acting those ancient imperatives out.

Thus the peril of authors making overt political claims.

First, I would like to apologize for falling behind on replying to comments: I hope to have an opportunity to catch up soon.

Also, I’ve been refraining on commenting on the FAN FIC submissions simply because I was afraid that it would stifle discussion. But I’m starting to worry I was mistaken. I’m thinking it might be cool to set up a FAN ART page as well, to keep adding to the amount of available content.

Larry at the OF Blog has actually reviewed both of the Atrocity Tales – welcome to the Information Age! Not only are authors effortlessly publishing drafts for universal consumption, reviewers are effortlessly publishing reviews of them. Larry is one of a growing number of ‘independent scholars’ who are helping tear down the boundaries between popular and academic culture. Over the past few decades the ratio between graduate students in the humanities and tenure-track positions has become more than dismal. I have friends with encyclopedic CVs who simply cannot find work anywhere within the Anglosphere–short of dead-end, poverty-level-paying sessional positions.

On an individual level, this is nothing short of disastrous. On a policy level this raises troubling questions about funding, since most graduate programs draw on the public purse. On a cultural level–at least I think, anyway–this ‘excess interpretative capacity’ has revolutionary potential.

Academic culture breeds ingroup specialization, which in turn breeds identification against non-specialists. The apparently endless rightward creep in voter attitudes over the past few decades, even in the face of middle-class stagnation and the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, is a supercomplicated social phenomena with supercomplicated contributing factors. One of them, I have been arguing, is the thematization and popularization of anti-intellectualism.

For years now I have been voting for the socialist New Democrats here in Canada, not for any ideological reasons (I actually have many problems with their platform), but because all the economic promises made by the right in the 80′s simply never materialized–unless you happened to be rich in the first place, that is. The primary problem with anti-intellectualism, as I see it, is not so much the way it makes a virtue out of ignorance as the way it tribalizes claims. The brain is a reluctant problem-solver: it’s far more interested in sorting claims according to social criteria rather than evaluating them on their independent merits. So when a relatively uncontroversial claim such as ‘Money is Power’ is painted with the colours of the enemy, it literally becomes impossible to debate the kinds of problems that inevitably fall out of the concentration of wealth. Thus the genuinely crazy irony of working-class voters consistently voting against their economic self-interests at the ballot box. Trickle-down economics simply does not work. If three decades of middle-class stagnation aren’t proof enough, then what is? Meanwhile more and more capital/power falls into the hands of the wealthy, who happen to be hardwired to confuse their narrow self-interest with divine law.

Even right-wing moderates (such as the estimable David Brooks, or even the editorial board of The Economist) are alarmed at the trends.

The ingroup excesses of liberal academia, I think, and the mass reaction against them, have rendered a whole demographic swathe of the North American population impervious to any kind of traditional appeal. As soon as you identify yourself against, conceding claims becomes a form of ingroup defection–‘treachery.’ In other words, what was difficult to begin with becomes all but impossible.

What might be called the Great Graduate Diaspora could very well be the remedy to this vast and potentially catastrophic social short circuit. Barred from the very ingroup they have toiled to join, humanities graduates are forced to join the rest of us, to communicate to people not like themselves. And they’re also forced to critically reevaluate what they were thinking in the first place, which is to say, the nature of the institution they thought they were buying into. There’s nothing quite like being locked out to make you critical of what’s within.

A new Atrocity Tale is up.

I had a lot of fun with this one, reaching back, as it does, to a pivotal moment in Far Antiquity. So much so, that it’s got me thinking about the way serial fantasy demands so much more of readers than any genre short of experimental avante garde stuff. Writing “The False Sun” felt… I dunno, thick, semantically dense in a way that my return to philosophical concerns can’t hope to. A fantasy world is a reality where Soul and World are coextensive. Our world (or even worse, the world of the Blind Brain Theory) is one where the Soul has shrunk to a delusional ember, and ‘profundity’ is little more than bell cruelly tied to a lap-dog’s tale.

But the very reason I enjoyed writing “The False Sun” so much is also the reason I need to issue a SEVERE SPOILER ALERT. The Second Apocalypse is big, so big that the narrative and thematic dimensions only come into collective focus here and there. ”The False Sun” is a story about the origins of the Consult, and so brings together the historical and metaphysical dimensions of the greater saga in a decisive way. Nothing is spoiled in terms of plot, but in terms of setting, this story cuts against the way the details of the World have been rationed over the course of the series. Drawing the curtain back on Golgotterath is something I’ve reserved for The Unholy Consult.

Thus the spoiler alert: Reading “The False Sun” will have a profound impact on your reading of The Unholy Consult, and if you are as jealous of your narrative surprises as I am, you might want to set this story on the back-burner.

Otherwise, dig in. There’s several things that I’m not certain about, and as always I appreciate any kind of feedback that can help me put these or other qualms to bed.

I intended to post over the holidays – Christ, I intended to do a lot of things over the holidays. But we were simply overrun, with shrieking, santa-mad, little girls for the most part. But friends and relatives as well… and booze. Christmas and New Years are always a strange time. There’s the calendar and all that, the changing of the guard on that little corner called ‘date’ on everything you sign. But it’s the people that really mark the passage of time. You, know, that uncle you only see once every holiday, who always manages to shock you into saying, ‘Did you see how old he’s getting?’ on the drive home – year after year after year.

That’s how we reckon our passage: the annual holiday survey of our cohort and others, the aging mobs, still getting drunk, still giggling the way they did getting baked behind the gymnasium when they were sixteen years old. All these kids, you think, wearing their parents’ and grandparents’ clothes – which is to say, skin. And those strangers – who invited them? And then there’s the gaps, the missing giggles, the way the ranks have been thinned.

A part of me always wakes up over the holidays, even as other parts take the chance to snooze. A part me wonders as I participate, thoughts warm and complicated. I’m nice. Everyone is nice. And it’s nice that we’re all so nice. It’s beautiful that forgetting is so effortless. A part of me wakes up and understands what it means to sleep, to roar with happy delirium, bringing in the Mayan year of doom.

Going into the holidays, I had resolved to not leave the ‘Bestiary’ up – what kind of Christmas message was that? 2012? That’s your end? Here’s an apocalypse for you…

I wanted to be nice. Lot’s of people talking, which means lots of people following up on the web about this and that. What kind of way is that to greet prospective readers?

But then I thought, fuck it. I’m not quite sure why.

That said, humans are still behind the literary wheel. And The White-Luck Warrior was fortunate enough to make it onto a handful of best of 2011 lists. In a bundle of rooms on a cold continent on a world that is a speck in a universe as vast and old as itself, I watched my little girl grasp the wonder of the gift for the first time, and for that moment the present was my present, unopened, and warm to the touch.

Welcome to 2012.

Amar Stevens, in his seminal Muse: The Exorcism of the Human, famously declared this the age of ‘Post-semanticism,’ where, as he puts it, “writers write with the knowledge that they write nothing” (7). He maps post-semantic literature according to its ‘meaning stance,’ the attitude it takes to the experience of meaning both in the text and the greater world, dividing it into four rough categories: 1) Nostalgic Prosemanticism, which he describes as “a paean to a world that never was” (38); 2) Revisionary Prosemanticism, which attempts “to forge new meaning, via forms of quasi-Nietzschean affirmation, out of the sciences of the soul” (122); 3) Melancholy Antisemanticism, which “embraces the death of meaning as an irredeemable loss” (243); and 4) Neonihilism, which he sees as “the gleeful production of novel semantic illusions via the findings of cognitive neuroscience” (381).

Stevens ends Muse with his famous declaration of the ‘death of literature’:

“For the sum of human history, storytelling, or ‘literature,’ has framed our identity, ordered our lives, and graced our pursuits with the veneer of transcendence. It seemed to be the baseline, the very ‘sea-level’ of what it meant to be human. But now that science has drained the black waters, we can see we have been stranded on lonely peaks all along, and that the wholesome family of meaning was little more than an assemblage of unrelated strangers. We were as ignorant of literature as you are ignorant of the monstrous complexities concealed by these words. Until now, all literature was confabulation, lies that we believed. Until now, we could enthral one another in good conscience. At last we can see there was never any such thing as ‘literature,’ realize that it was of a piece with the trick of perspective we once called the soul” (498)

Algorithmic Sentimentalism: Freely disseminated computer-generated fiction based on the neuronarrative feedback work of Dr. Hilary Kohl, designed to maximize the possibilities of product placement while engendering the ‘mean peak narrative response,’ or story-telling pleasure. Following the work of neurolinguist Pavol Berman, whose ‘Whole Syntax Theory’ is credited with transforming linguistics into a properly natural science, Kohl developed the imaging techniques that allowed her to isolate what she called Subexperiential Narrative Grammar (SNG), and so, like Berman before her, provided narratology with its scientific basis. “Once we were able to isolate the relevant activation architecture, the grammar and its permutations became clear as a road map,” she explained in a 2035 OWN interview. “Then it was simply a matter of imaging people while they read the story-telling greats, and deriving the algorithms needed to generate new heart-touching and gut-wrenching novels.

In 2033, she founded the publishing startup, Muse, releasing algorithmically produced novels for free and generating revenue through the sale of corporate product placements. Initial skepticism was swept away in 2034, when Imp, the story of a small boy surviving the tribulations of ‘social sanctioning’ in a Haitian public school, won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and was short-listed for the Man Booker. In 2040, Muse purchased Bertelsmann to become the largest publisher in the world.

In a recent Salon interview, Kohl claimed to have developed what she called Submorphic Adaptation Algorithms that could “eventually replace all literature, even the so-called avante garde fringe.” In a rebuttal piece that appeared in the New York Times, she outraged academics by claiming “Shakespeare only seems deep because we can’t see past the skin of what is really going on, and what has been all along.”

Mundane Fantasy (aka, the ‘mundane fantastic’ or ‘nostalgic realism’ in academic circles): According to Stevens, the primary nostalgic prosemantic genre, the “vestigial remnant of what was once the monumental edifice of mainstream literary fiction” (39).

Technorealism: According to Stevens, the primary revisionary pro-semantic genre, where the traditional narrative form remains as “something to be gamed and/or problematized” (Muse, 45) in the context of “imploding social realities” (46).

Neuroexperimentalism: Movement founded by Gregor Shin, which uses data-mining to isolate so-called ‘orthogonalities,’ a form of lexical and sentential ‘combinetrics’ that generate utterly novel semantic effects.

Impersonalism:  A major literary school (commonly referred to as ‘It Lit’) centred around the work of Michel Grant (who famously claims to be the illegitimate son of the late Michel Houellebecq, even though DNA evidence has proved otherwise), which has divided into a least two distinct movements, Hard Impersonalism, where no intentional concepts are used whatsoever, and Soft Impersonalism, where only the so-called ‘Intentionalities of the Self’ are eschewed.

New Absurdism: A growing, melancholy anti-semantic movement inspired by the writing of Tuck Gingrich, noted for what Stevens calls, “its hysterical anti-realism.” Mira Gladwell calls it the ‘meta-meta’ - or ‘meta-squared’ - for the way it continually takes itself as its object of reference. In “One for One for One,” a small position piece published in The New Yorker, the famously reclusive Gingrich seems to argue (the text is notoriously opaque) that “meta-inclusionary satire” constitutes a form of communication that algorithmic generation can never properly duplicate. To date, neither Muse nor Penguin-Narratel have managed to disprove his claim. A related genre called Anthroplasticism has recently found an enthusiastic audience in literary science departments across eastern China and, ironically enough, the southern USA.

Extinctionism: The so-called ‘cryptic school’ thought by many to be algorithmic artifacts, both because of the volume and anonymity of texts available. However, Sheila Siddique, the acclaimed author of Without, has recently claimed connection to the school, stating that the anonymity of authorship is crucial to the authenticity of the genre, which eschews all notions of agency.

I’ve posted a couple a new pages, one where anyone interested can post their FAN FIC for me and the world to see. I’m not sure if there’s any word limit for posting on comments or not, but we shall find out soon enough. The reason I want prospective stories posted to the comments is simply to spare me the formatting headaches I always have posting stuff I’ve written to wordpress. I’m hoping that formatting it for clean presentation as a comment will make the process of putting it on a sub-page a simply matter of cutting and pasting. We shall see!

Otherwise, I’ve decided that I’m going to pretend that I’m Einstein for the next few days. The second new page is devoted to another philosophical piece, CAUSA SUIcide, which turned out to be every bit as spiritually exhausting as it was intellectually exciting. It gave me a chance to think through the final kinks of my Blind Brain Theory, and there was just this click… and suddenly it all fell into place for me – all the thinking I’ve put into the problem of consciousness for the past ten plus years.

I’ve suffered moments of philosophical mania before, but never anything like this. So as it stands now, anyway, I think I’ve actually come up with a theoretical approach to consciousness that solves all the ancient and contemporary perplexities. I know damn well the way it works, how the ferocity of revelation mellows with the piling on of questions, how philosophical clarity is as much an artifact of ignorance as religious certainty…

But as a long time denizen of a dark and murky world, I quite like this feeling. In fact, I’m keeping notes, so that I can work it into the novels. I get accused of being Kellhus enough – I might as well spend a few days walking in his shoes or sandals or whatever. So I’m swearing off philosophy for a while, and introducing myself to complete strangers as the Man Who Solved the Riddle of Consciousness. Uh-huh. Yep. Uh-huh.

I’m even thinking of changing my name to Vox.

Head cold. First snow of the year. And strange days at the Brain.

This post was intended to simply notify everybody of a couple additional posts I had made in the limbic basement. First, there’s ”Parmenide’s Hinge,” a failed prospectus for the failed dissertation attempt I made prior to Truth and Context. I actually stumbled across it searching through some old files for an ancient short story I had written (back to that in a moment). The reread blew me away, not only because I had completely forgotten about it, but because it happened to end, I mean literally end,  with the question I had answered for another short piece, this one new, that I had written in response to a philosopher named Ray Brassier, whose excellent Nihil Unbound I have been using as a guide book for my safari through some of the more recent Continental philosophy. It still freaks me out how I could work for years on a question that I had forgotten.

Meanwhile, after weeks of intense back and forth on the comment board, the blog essentially falls silent. Except that it isn’t silent. The numbers are up (TPB now has literally twice the traffic it had even several months ago), but nobody seems to be posting. Since I let my temper get the best of me on a couple of occasions the last two dust-ups (Murph! Where did you go, brother?) I worried that maybe my thin skin was scaring potential commentators away. So I decided to check out what everyone seemed to be reading… I never realized that WordPress had so many tools for dowsing traffic.

Two big surprises.  The biggest one has to be my review of Infinite Jest. In a matter of five or six weeks it’s managed to become one of the most viewed pages on the blog short of the main page! Don’t ask me how – or why. It makes me think I should do more reviews!

The most significant surprise, however, is that my short reply to Ray Brassier is getting hundreds of hits. Then I get a couple of emails from friends out in the philosophy world telling me about the buzz the thing appears to have created. It almost seems like the rest of the blog has gone quiet in expectation. So I get this crazy Doctor Frankenstein feeling, that all these years I’ve been toiling in isolation, fearing as much as hoping that the world would discover my ‘work,’ only to wake up and find that my basement laboratory had been broken into!

It’s all good, I know. It’s what I wanted  to happen. But stay tuned: with any luck, you’re about to find out what happens when a fringe crackpot engages a foundational cultural institution.

But meanwhile, back to that short story I was looking for, “The Judas Tree.” I thought some of you might find it interesting to read something written before The Darkness that Comes Before. And then I made the mistake of reading the bloody thing – and realized why I had sworn off short-story writing altogether way back then. Peee-yewww! And once again I found myself two people sitting in one chair: the marketer saying, “Good God, man, who would buy any of your books after seeing that shite?”; and the decent  human being saying, “It would actually be good for some people to see how much writing was more a matter of work and craft than something you just lucked into at birth!”

Usually the decent human being wins out in these episodes, but I have been very, very hard on the marketer of late. And let’s face it, he’s the guy who pays the bills.

So I’m trying to think how I can have it both ways… And fire up the comment strings in the process!

Aphorism of the Day II: Earwa, like Biblical Israel, smells of balls.

So I’ve posted what will be the final version of “Four Revelations” on the site. It feels much, much tighter to me now. The non sequiturs feel pregnant with meaning. The flashbacks all feel like they’ve been torn from greater narratives. The parallels between the flashbacks and the present strike some odd and allusive semantic notes. The language feels fresh, the images raw. For me anyway. I’ve also injected a note of imperial condescension into the Nonman’s observations – something I might expand in subsequent tinkering.

This is precisely the way I work with novels, though typically I find myself streamlining the language, paring the lyricism back, unlike here. I run through it, take some time, then run through it again, killing the lame and looking for alternate opportunities. When I think about writing, I literally think about rewriting: this is where it begins to feel like sculpture to me, like a non-linear exercise, when I have a blob of meaning already given that I can shape and detail.

Of course it’s all in my head. Everything I’m discussing here exists nowhere but in my head (and perhaps not even there!), which really shows both the presumption and the risk that underwrites all creative writing: to assume that these things happening here will also happen out there, in the heads of others. That’s what makes this an indulgent piece, and from a brute marketing standpoint, probably the worst one I could have chosen as my first Atrocity Tale!

But I’m happy with it. Earwa is where brutality goes to be beautiful, and insofar as “Four Revelations” continues the examination of this paradox, I’m happy with it. For those of you who think it… just… is… ‘brutal,’ You got me all wrong! This story literally leaps across the line that I force all the novels to walk – intentionally so.

On a different note, I’ve opened a small kiosk in the Speculative Fragments section called “Adventures in Recent Continental Thought“  for the hard core philosophy wankers out there. A lot has happened in the last ten years, and I’ve finally grown curious enough to check it all out. Academic philosophy underwent a radical split around the turn of the 20th century, with ‘Hegel fatigue’ and the new logic inspiring a number of German and English thinkers to abandon the 19th century preoccupation with Idealism, and to take a second-order linguistic approach to philosophical problems, while others on the Continent decided to only wipe part of the blackboard clean, and to continue the original Kantian project with an eye to the priority of examing appearances as they appear, and life as it is lived. The Analytic/Continental divide in philosophy was born, and having attended a PhD program evenly split between the two, I can tell you first hand that it was so radical that parties from either camp literally could not understand each other.

The fact that no one in the real world could understand either of them didn’t seem to make much of an impression (beyond a kind of condescending defensiveness). Nor did the fact that they often couldn’t understand themselves. But then philosophy is where languages are birthed just to watch them die. In present Continental Thought, there’s a huge attempt to go ‘backward,’ to free philosophy from Kant’s critical bottleneck, and to return to the ancient work of Metaphysics. In certain circles, it is cool to be ‘Cartesian’ once again. 

If you can see past the jargon it’s quite interesting, but as far as I can tell it lacks the obvious genius of some individual figure to provide the cohesive framework of implicit or explicit consensus to survive long as ‘movement.’ Viewed for a certain institutional distance, the key to the success of any Continental philosophical movement seems to be the provision of some kind of wholesale perjorative label, the ‘Problematic Ontological Assumption’ that has bottled all other philosophy in a blind alley. This is the most efficient way to accomplish two central goals: explain why it is you have won the magical philosophy lottery and hook impressionable grad students hungry to stake new ground. The new POA turns of ‘Correlation,’ the way post-Kantian philosophy are all philosophies of ‘access.’ At this point, I don’t think Correlation has the mileage a POA needs to keep a movement going, but the rules of philosophical contagion have radically changed – in just ten years, no less. I find it interesting the way the proliferation of so many philosophy blogs has the effect of displaying how much philosophical transformation is driven by good old fashioned social competition.

But anyway, if you’re into these sort of things, and your jargon tolerance is epic, I’ll be posting my impressions and evaluations as I read on. I begin with a partially tongue-in-cheek critique of the ‘philosophical book,’ then consider Francois Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ philosophy, ending with the invention of something called ‘Rhapsophy,’ as philosophy’s ‘other other.’

Three Pound Brain remains, as ever, the crossroads between incompatible empires.

1) The industry is all but in a state of crisis right now, so I just wanted to urge everyone to cultivate a culture buying books. As a midlist author, I am on the bubble, so any appreciable erosion of my sales will force me out of the full-time writing game. It really is as simple as that. It only took me ten years to write The Darkness That Comes Before part-time! So cut a crazy old headbanger a break and spread the word when you can.

2) The Unholy Consult continues to grow, but more slowly than I had hoped.  At the moment, things feel forced and wooden, at which point I begin obessessively rewriting. I want this book to crack like a whip, almost too much I sometimes worry. But every book I’ve written (with the exception of Disciple of the Dog) has been a melodrama like this, alternating between inspriration and desperation.

 3) In an effort to reboot my brain, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks exploring the chaotic mess of documents on my computer. I actually posted several substantial fragments of my final dissertation attempt, so for those of you interested, there’s plenty of stuff to make you go cross-eyed. For that small handful who has read Derrida or Heidegger, I also posted a new piece on the Limit With One Side. Believe or not, but I think the overall word count for Three Pound Brain has doubled.

4) And lastly, I have finally discovered Catherynne Valente. I read her short story “The Bread We Eat in Dreams” hot on the heels of completing Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, which has only won, um, let’s see, the Pulitzer and just about every other award America has to offer, and Valente not only makes her look like a prose drone, she also writes fantasy.

She could very well be the One.

I just thought I would post to let you know that I’ve posted the first substantial rewrite of “Four Revelations,” as well as to clear one raucous comment list to make room for another.

This second draft should give you all an idea of how I work: a first draft written in the heat of some idea, followed by a second that tries to expunge the tired language, tighten the details, sharpen the imagery, and to exploit the various dramatic, thematic, and stylistic opportunities that might have suggested themselves over the intervening days. So in this version, I worked on the parallels and contrasts between the timeframes, drawing out some of the ancient memories, snipping others. I made Conphas more flip to contrast his arrogance to that of Cu’jara Cinmoi. I also gave him a more salient role, with both a motive and a slight backstory. I strengthened and paced the network of repetitions. I also reworked the tenses throughout, giving the jumble of past and present tenses from before a definite structure.

It’s still missing something, though. I’m not happy with the development of the overarching concern, the notion of scale and proportion, the Nonman versus the human, the epic versus the mundane, the glorious versus the sordid.

Regarding the comments, have at ‘er. As frustrated as I sometimes get, the fact is I love families where everyone kicks one another’s shins under the table. And I love that Three Pound Brain is such a lively, opinionated place. Someone pass the cheese, please…